I read him parts of the 2005 interview with him and his high school friends, and he chuckled. “It’s funny to hear this interview now,” he said. “The school we were attending was the Gymnasium for Global Education, the only one in St. Petersburg. They were trying to develop this global way of thinking, teaching us tolerance from the first grade.
“But since I moved to Europe, I’ve come to understand that people are tired of being tolerant here,” he said. “I hear a lot of jokes, going to bars with students in Bologna, in the heart of Italy. It’s a city of workers, and all the jokes are either racist or homophobic.”
Vanya’s plan was to graduate in the fall of 2016, after which he’d look for a job in either Europe or Asia. “There’s no point coming back with a European diploma—Russian employers won’t even know what the University of Bologna is,” he said. He figured he was most likely to find a good job in Asia, though that was much farther away from his family than he preferred.
“It would be best to be an expert for a Western company and work in St. Petersburg,” he told me. “But the sanctions have put a fence between Western industry and Russian industry. I’d like to be an employee of Shell and work in St. Petersburg, but there are so many things in the way—oil prices, the krizis, the political situation. The sanctions will be in place for years, and they do have an effect.”
I told him about a theory I’d heard several times, that the Western sanctions had served to bring Russians together, uniting them against a common foe.
“Yes, that’s true,” he said, then laughed. “People were putting stickers on their cars: A picture of a bear giving himself a manicure with a big pair of nail clippers. And across the clippers was the word ‘Sanctions’—so, he was showing that the sanctions will only serve to sharpen his claws.”
At the end of our interview, Vanya brought the subject back around to his Spanish Communist friend. “I was in Madrid for a week this summer,” he said, “and we had a lot of conversations. He said that the Revolution was the best thing that ever happened to Russia, and that Stalin would never allow all the things that are happening now.
“But I told him, that period for us was brother killing brother. My family—my mother’s line—was in the Crimea at the time, in Feodosiya. Lots of them were killed, and they lost their property and everything.” This, of course, was Maria Mikhailovna’s family.
I asked if he remembered my first visit with him and Maria Mikhailovna, when he was just six years old. “No,” he said. “In fact, I don’t really remember her at all.” He told me that the photos Gary had taken were the only ones of them together, and that the family was grateful to have them.
I didn’t think to tell him, but wish I had, that his great-great-grandmother had been correct in her prediction all those years ago. “Who knows what the future will be like for this country?” she’d said then. “But he will do well.” Vanya is a smart, ambitious, hard-working young man whose fondest wish is to live and work in Russia, the land of his ancestors. I only hope that he will be able to find a job and return there, to help build and shape his homeland in the years to come.
Epilogue
By the end of the 2015 trip, I was exhausted. For two and a half months, I’d been compulsively focused and organized, taking reams of notes, shooting hundreds of photographs, and keeping obsessive track of my stuff. When the finish line was in sight, I finally allowed myself to relax—perhaps a little too much.
With three days to go, I left my backpack hanging on a chair after lunch with a friend in St. Petersburg. By the time I realized my mistake, I was sure it would be gone—along with my wallet, phone, and iPad. To my immense relief, the bag was right where I’d left it. I couldn’t believe my luck, and made a mental note to be more careful.
The next day, I dropped my iPhone in a toilet. And the day after that, while I was blithely waiting at a crosswalk on crowded Nevsky Prospekt, a thief unzipped my backpack and stole my wallet. I rushed to cancel my credit cards, but this was getting ridiculous. The way I was going, if the trip didn’t end soon, I’d lose not only all my valuables, but possibly my sanity as well.
Yet for all the irritation these final incidents caused, they also served as a reminder of how incredibly fortunate I’d been—and how very well I’d been treated here. In the months leading up to the trip, I’d been racked with worry about traveling alone, anti-American sentiment, safety on the trains, homophobia, potential visa trouble, you name it. But in all those weeks of travel, I’d encountered very little difficulty, and a great deal of generosity. People who had nothing to gain by talking to an American writer nonetheless willingly opened their lives to me, even when it was clear they weren’t fans of the nation I call home.
So, while it appears to be true that overall, relations between Russia and America are at their worst since the Stalin era, it’s also true—at least in my experience—that most Russians bear no ill will toward us. “People are people” was a phrase I heard again and again, whether in the hills of Buryatia, on the waters of Lake Baikal, or sitting in any of the innumerable kitchens where Russians fed me and we toasted our friendship.
We have many more similarities than differences, a truth that, as I write this, happens to be bolstered by an article prominently featured on CBSnews.com: “Wandering Bear Shuts Down Los Angeles Neighborhood.”
A young bear is back in the Angeles National Forest after leading Los Angeles police officers, firefighters and animal control officers on a wild chase through a Sylmar neighborhood Monday night.
The animal was first spotted around 8 p.m. on the campus of Mission College on Eldridge Avenue, reports CBS Los Angeles. For two hours, the bear was running through streets, alleys and front yards.
I’m just saying.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Gary Matoso, for including me on your bold and brilliant 1995 journey. It’s no exaggeration to say that our trip, and your example of perseverance and daring, changed my life. Thanks also to Tripp Mikich and Chuck Gathard, who made the groundbreaking Russian Chronicles website possible, and to our original sponsors, FocalPoint f/8, World Media Network, Sprint, Kodak, and Leica.
Thank you, David Hillegas, for taking a chance and joining me (on incredibly short notice) for the 2005 trip. And to both Gary and David, thank you for your magnificent photos, and for the permission to reproduce them in this book. Thanks also to Washingtonpost.com, in particular then-editor Jim Brady, for agreeing to run our 2005 blog, and to I-Linx for sponsoring that trip. And a tremendous thank-you to the friends and family who, after my bag was stolen in St. Petersburg, gave generously and without hesitation to make up the cash I’d lost. You know who you are.
To Elisabeth Dyssegaard of St. Martin’s Press, thank you for believing in this project, and for having the courage to offer me a book deal even before knowing what would happen on the third trip. To Gail Ross and Howard Yoon, thank you for being wonderful literary agents, but more important, for being great friends. Thanks also to Laura Apperson, Donna Cherry, Lauren Friedlander, and Kathryn Hough of St. Martin’s Press.
So many people have offered support over the years—everything from reading drafts to providing a bed in a far-flung place to simply offering encouragement when I needed it most. For these reasons and more, I’m grateful to Debby and Oleg Abramov, Ben Barnes, Laura Birek, Charles Digges, Dana Eagle, Christopher Hamilton, Roz Jacobs, Brad Kessler, Jesse Kornbluth, Karman Kregloe, Dona McAdams, Bridget McManus, Rada Mirzoeva, Pierre Noel, Lynda Park, Marina Ratina, Jill Sobule, Amy Turner, Lusya Verholuk, and Laurie Weisman. Thanks also to my wonderful circle of DC friends, to Nancy Desser of JFS, and to the babushkas of West Hollywood, in particular Roza and Sofia.